The Girls of Tonsil Lake by Liz Flaherty

around her eyes, but so do we all except Suzanne. She still has those wonderful cheekbones and the longest legs this side of the NBA.
    It was quite a scene when we all came together at the airport in Bangor. I think we all ended up crying, except maybe Andie. You’d have been appalled! *smile*
    The house is wonderful. We each have our own room, and we share two bathrooms. There are wraparound porches, upstairs verandas and everything is very light and cozy with mismatched beachy-looking furniture and plenty of old-fashioned lamps so that you never have to look around for a bright spot.
    I don’t know why I’m writing you when I’m sure we’ll talk nearly every day. I guess I need the written word. That’s not bad as vices go, being a written word junkie.
    I love you, David. Be safe.
    I slipped the letter into an envelope on the little white desk in my room and climbed into bed, leaving the windows open. The sea breeze was wonderful, soothing, and cool, and I was exhausted. I fell asleep immediately, with the bedside lamp still burning and Elisabeth Ogilvie’s Rowan Head lying on my chest.
    I woke before dawn with tears on my face, burning up even though the room was cold. I thought about going downstairs, but was reluctant to move in case I got sick again. This was not a good beginning to a vacation.
    The fears that usually stayed in the back of my mind came right straight to the front when David wasn’t in bed beside me, and for a moment I considered getting on the phone and asking him to come for me. Carrie had done that every year at camp.
    “I’m lonely here. Can’t you and Daddy come and get me?”
    “Just give it a day, sweetheart. If you still want to come home tomorrow, we’ll come and get you.” She never called back, and was in fact always reluctant to come home when camp was over.
    So just give it a day, Jean.
    I wished Andie hadn’t mentioned my mother the other morning. Thinking of her illness and death only added darkness to my shadowy fears.
    I had been thirty-two when she died, so busy with the children and the house that there hadn’t been any time to think much about the disease that killed her. I’d done that later, as I sat beside David’s mother’s bed and did for her what I’d never done for Ma.
    “You’re always going to write.” David’s words came back to me as I lay there, and I reached for the notebook computer I had hooked up earlier, just in case. I stacked the feather pillows behind me, wincing as the movements hurt my stomach, and opened the computer.
    I wrote until I noticed that the letters weren’t very bright on the screen, and when I looked up I discovered that it was full daylight. There were five new pages of manuscript and my stomach had stopped hurting. Well, almost. My bladder, however, was a different story.
    A few minutes later, I followed the smell of coffee down to the kitchen. Vin was there, looking exotic in a long sleeveless black gown that appeared opaque until she moved, when you could the shadows of what was underneath. I spent a moment resenting that what she had underneath wasn’t nearly as lumpy as what I had.
    “I’ve decided”—she poured a mug of coffee and pushed it across the counter to me—“that hot flashes are our punishment for skinny dipping in Tonsil Lake.” Her auburn hair was damp at the temples despite the cool morning.
    I made my eyes as wide as I could and stared over at her. “I never did.”
    “Liar.”
    We laughed softly. “Well, most of the time we didn’t have bathing suits that fit,” I defended, “and we got in trouble if we swam in our clothes. We didn’t really have any choice.”
    “Did you take David back there when you were going together?”
    I looked down at my cup, remembering. “He insisted. When we decided to get married, he said it wasn’t right that he’d never met my parents, never seen where I came from. So we drove up from Bloomington one Friday after we got out of class.
    “When we got